Of course I'm alive, you're fucking talking to me, who or whatever the fuck you are. Christ, what a fucking hangover. Wait, what worked?

"You don't know how long I've been looking for you!"

Longer than I've been able to sleep whatever I drank off, obviously.

"I'm a Ghost, actually, I'm your Ghost. And you, you've been dead a long time. So, you're going to see a lot of things you don't understand."

No shit, starting with the floating, glowing piece of metal that looks like an open box from one of those Hellraiser movies. Seriously, what the fuck is going on? What do you mean I've been dead? And where the the exact fuck am I? I'm in a goddamn field of rusted out cars outside a wall next to what looks like a bunch of space shuttles. Am I in Kazakhstan? What the hell am I doing in the KZ?

"This is Fallen territory, we aren't safe here."

Well, yeah. I'm pretty sure if I died here, it wasn't safe before it was Fallen territory either. Unless, of course, I drowned in my own vomit or some other Hendrix/Joplin/Cobain shit. Kinda don't remember shoving a shotgun in my mouth or puking in my sleep, so I'm gonna rule all that shit right the hell out.

"I have to get you to the city"

I hope it's not on the other side of that beat to shit wall, because if that's where we're going, I think I'l just go back to sleep in this rusted-out beater over here.

"Hold still"

What? Where the hell did you go, hellbox?

"Don't worry I'm still with you, we need to move. Fast!"

Ok, maybe I'm still drunk because now the box is saying things to me in my head.

"We won't survive long out in the open like this, we'd better get inside the Wall."

Yeah, that beater's looking real fucking comfortable right now... Then I hear the screeching. Definitely not human and definitely not friendly. Maybe the wall's not such a bad idea after all. I start heading toward the wall, the sound of screeching getting closer behind me. I get into the Wall and it's a continuation of the rusted-out motif that I've been looking at since I woke up. Only this time it's dark. And it smell like old concrete and copper.

"Ok, I need to find you a weapon before the Fallen find us."

You mean I have to fight these screechy fuckers? You'd better find me a goddamn rocket launcher or something. Of course, I'm running blind into this old Russian mega structure, talking to a voice in my head and still trying to figure out what's going on, maybe I should just wish for a fucking lightsaber and the Force.

"Quiet, they're right above us."

If I can hear you, can they? Because if yes, you need to shut the fuck up too. At least until you find me that lightsaber. Or even a fucking flashlight, it's dark as hell in here and I'm pretty sure I saw a railing over a very big abyss.

"Hang tight, fallen thrive in the dark, we won't. We need more light. I'll see what I can do."

Yeah, you get on that. I'll be here hoping I don't get munched on by whatever the hell was making that noise outside.

The ghost flits off into the widening darkness looking for a light switch or something, I guess. Yeah, this place is fucking huge. And dark. And hugedark.

"Another one of these hardened military systems... and a few centuries of entropy working against me.

Wait, what? Just how long have I been dead? The ghost manages to get some lights on and that's when I see them. I guess these guys are the fallen. They're all over the place, crawling down pipes, hanging from rafters.

"They're coming for us!"

I make a break for the deeper interior, where I find an old assault rifle leaning conveniently against a case.

"I hope you know how to use that thing."

Of course I do. Apparently I'm an undead badass. I run down a hallway and turn a corner and from the ceiling drop a couple of Fallen. These guys have two arms and a couple of vestigial arm humps below those arms. Like the lower set was cut off. I make quick work of the alien amputees and move on around a corner only to come face to face with a third one. I quickly plant a knife in its face and then vault over it's falling corpse. A right and a left and I find myself heading for a clearing in the clutter of this space. Three more of these rooster-headed amputees come running from somewhere ahead. I dispatch them with the old Russian rifle and turn to face what must be their big brother. This guy's a bit taller and has four working arms, two of which are holding guns he's shooting at me with. I empty half a mag in him starting center mass and climbing to his head which pops with a satisfying sigh and a puff of smoke. he drops like a rock.

"There's more ahead, keep it up!"

Well, considering the other option is running back out into the tundra with who knows how many more of these bastards, yeah, pretty sure that's the best course of action. Maybe. Hellbox here could be leading me into the center of a fucking hive for all I know.

I come up to an ornate crate with a lock on it,

"A loot cache, let's see what's inside."

If it's not that lightsaber... It's not. It's a sniper rifle. Actually, that may be better. I continue deeper and turn a corner to see laser tripwires crisscrossing the corridor ahead.

"Tripines! Don't touch them!"

No shit. As if to punctuate the sentiment, a dreg pops out of a panel in the floor and immediately trips one of the lasers, blowing himself to smithereens. Who the fuck set these things up if not these guys? Questions for later. I do my best Catherine Zeta Jones circa 1999 and scoot my ass through the lasers while busting caps in random alien asses. I run the rest of the gauntlet and sneak out into a large room crawling with aliens of both the two-armed and four-armed variety. All of them with a hard-on for me.

Time to clean house.

I put down a dozen or so Fallen and then another dozen that it looks like heard the gunfire and screams and came to investigate. I then exit, stage right through the tunnel the last group came from and find myself out in an open courtyard.

"The Fallen have a tighter hold on this place than I thought. Just a little bit further. Let's hope there's something left out there..."

It turns out there is. Just not what I was hoping to find. As I enter the courtyard, a flare goes up. The ghost informs me that this was an old cosmodrome and hopes we can find something useful. Of course, the thing we're finding now is Fallen ships folding in really close to the surface. Closer than they should be and apparently desperate to fuck with me. What did I do to piss these guys off? The ghost urges me to move and I do. Further into the courtyard, looking for any cover I can find. I duck around the wreckage of a pillar and cap a few Fallen as the others continue to stream from a couple of dropships. They try to flank me and I roll out from my cover and make a break through some rusted out trucks and for a nearby machine shed. The sound of their shock rifles sizzling behind me. I drop the two approaching me from the right and then roll over and take out the stragglers before dropping into a flat-out run for another structure on the far side of the clearing.

As I get toward the structure, a new wave of dregs and things that look like flying waffle irons come out to take pot shots at me. A few minutes of ducking, diving shooting and stabbing later and I'm through them. Just in time to trigger the ability to throw flashbang grenades. Cool.

The ghost tells me that deeper into this place, we might be able to find an old jumpship that should help us get the hell out of dodge and to this mythical city. I fight my way through a a few more rooms, sweeping and clearing as I go, until I get to a room with an old ship in it, suspended from cables and crawling with Fallen.

"That's it! Take them out", the ghost beckons. I of course, obey. Fourteen dead aliens and a shitload of flying waffle irons later, I stand under the ship. The ghost does what he can to get it running again and then manages to beam me aboard. No sooner are we blasting out than the biggest Fallen I've seen so far comes crawling out of a huge hole in the wall. The ghost tells me we'll come back and kick his ass later. When we're ready.

As the ship clears the wall and makes its way for the city, a stranger in a ragged hood and cape watches...

Tuned in, immediately get to watch cringey Ubisoft talking head offering her deepest sympathies to the families impacted by the Orlando shooting while flanked by a man in a giraffe suit and some sort of "horrifically garish neon costumes through the ages" exhibit or something. We need to stop this fucking planet right now and sort some shit out. -Kail

So, it's been roughly a year since I woke up in a rusted-out-shitbox in the remains Old Russia's Cosmodrome. (It was a 22nd century Skoda, by the way) During that year, I've seen some serious shit. I fought my way across the planet and came up against the Fallen (They call themselves the Eliksni, by the way, and as it turns out they're not all dicks, just 99.9999% of them.) and the Hive. (Inter dimensional zombie assholes. Seriously.) Then I made my way to Venus and fought the Vex, organic machines that can transcend time and space and managed to turn Mercury into a giant calculator inside 24 hours in the wake of The Collapse.

What was the Collapse? It was the fall of humankind a few centuries after it came into contact with the Traveler. Early in the 21st century, we discovered an object making its way toward Earth, it made a pit stop at Mars and we went there to see what it was doing. It was terraforming the fucking planet. Rain fell for the first time there in millennia. The Traveler went on to transform Venus, Mercury and a bunch of moons around the gas giants. It extended human life by a couple of centuries and accelerated our technology by leaps and bounds, ushering in a Golden Age.

Then, the Traveler's ancient enemy, the Darkness showed up and everything went to shit. We retreated from the worlds we'd claimed and huddled back on Earth. We built Exos, essentially self-aware terminators to help us fight the darkness. To no avail apparently.

That was the collapse. It was there that I died for the first time.

In the final moments of the Collapse, the Traveler sacrificed itself to save humanity. With it's last breath, it created ghosts like the one that found me. Those ghosts went and resurrected all the badasses of the golden age and the collapse that it could. Those badasses were called Guardians and they came in three varieties, Hunters, Titans and Warlocks. Hunters roamed the wastes, looking for survivors of the collapse and shepherding them to the Last City. Titans built the walls around the City and defended it. Warlocks? Warlocks crawled up their own asses in search for the meaning of life the universe and everything.

Me? I found myself through all of my adventures. I'm a Hunter. I'm going hunting.

After fucking with the Vex's plans somewhat, I ran into the Awoken and the Cabal in the asteroid belt and on Mars. The Awoken used to be us, but then, during The Collapse, they ran from Earth and something changed them. Some of my fellow Guardians are Awoken. I trust them. I don't particularly trust their queen, hot though she may be. Of course, to get to the heart of the Vex presence on Mars, I had to do a few things that ended up with me in her debt. I eventually paid that off, but it came at the cost of hunting down a bunch of Fallen she'd had under her thumb. The Cabal are like the Roman empire, if the Roman empire was made up of 14-foot-tall space armadillos with no senses of humor and enough ordnance to blow planets up if they're feeling squirrely.

The person watching me as I escaped the cosmodrome? Some cryptic Exo chick that told me shit was about to get real with the Vex. She disappeared after that and only showed up briefly after I fucked the Vex up to give me her temporarily useful rifle and warn me the this was just the beginning. At least she wasn't wrong about that.

A brief respite after killing the Vex god, I found myself and my crew delving into the Vault of Glass, a Vex underworld where they fucked with time itself. A couple fire teams went in there before us and got pretty much erased from existence. We used the advice of the last surviving member of that crew, (The fucker sacrificed himself to save us.) and put the keeper of the Vault down like a giant robot dog.

A couple of months later, some crazy awoken hunter shows up in the tower, my home in the last city. (I've never been able to leave the tower and explore the city, but I'm pretty sure that's because rubbing elbows with the locals would probably scare the living shit out of them. Seriously, how would you feel rolling through your local supermarket looking for fresh veggies while some immortal badass strolls through with a goddamn rocket launcher strapped to his back?) That hunter, Eris, was stuck in a cavern on the moon for years after her crew fucked up a shot at trying to take it back from the Hive. The shit she did to survive even makes me cringe. Anyway, Eris tells us that the Hive's god Crota is coming back to fuck our shit up because I happened to sort of wake his ass up while I was traipsing around the moon. Cool. Bring it the fuck on.

I gather my crew again and we roll into Crota's house and we fuck his shit up, tearing every hive bastard a new asshole on the way in. I'm two for two on fucking up god's days at this point. If Zuul ever shows up and asks if I'm a god, I can say, "No, but I've killed a couple, one of them with his own sword, so I suggest you back the fuck up to the nearest alternate dimension."

That favor the Queen called in? Yeah, she got sold out by some mysterious assholes she did a deal with and the leader of the Fallen she was controlling rolled in and took his squad back, killing a bunch of her Awoken in the process. Needless to say she was pissed and asked me to hunt the traitors down. I did of course, because I'm a badass and getting out from under her thumb was a no brainer. A week later, all the Fallen's House of Wolves are six feet under and I'm walking away clean. During the course of that week, I meet that one good Eliksni who's on my side and he tells me why they're really on Earth. They're following the Traveler. Apparently, the last race the Traveler uplifted were the Eliksni, shit got real on their homeworld when the Darkness showed up and the Traveler ran, leaving them hanging. Like a jilted ex, they've followed the Traveler to Earth in an effort to win back its affections.

Too bad it's pretty much dead.

That brings us to two days ago. I got dispatched to a Cabal Base on Phobos, they'd gone from their usual radio discipline to screaming like little girls on open channels. I hit the scene and they're bugging the fuck out of the base and bombing the shit out of it as they leave. Cabal turning on Cabal? Nope, not that simple. Something's hopped in and started kicking the shit out of them. Something not me. I don't know whether to be insulted or impressed. As I make my way further into the base, I find signs of some sort of inter dimensional space goo. The goo seems to want to feed on living things and pulls them into it.

What it does after that is pretty fucked up. It turns them into nightmare versions of themselves. I find Cabal fighting shadow versions of themselves deeper in and for once, I feel sorry for the giant bastards. No wonder they're trying so hard to get the fuck out of dodge. I also find Cabal Intel saying that the source of the goo and the shadows is a giant ship that's taken up residence in the rings of Saturn. The owner of the ship? Crota's dad, Oryx. Apparently, he's pissed that I buried his son's sword in his dome and he's come for payback. He calls himself the Taken King. and literally "takes" living things and turns them into twisted versions of what they were.

And he's calling me out.

Now where did I put that sword...?

« Last Edit: September 18, 2015, 10:41:02 PM by Surlyboi »

Tuned in, immediately get to watch cringey Ubisoft talking head offering her deepest sympathies to the families impacted by the Orlando shooting while flanked by a man in a giraffe suit and some sort of "horrifically garish neon costumes through the ages" exhibit or something. We need to stop this fucking planet right now and sort some shit out. -Kail